Benitez said: “I last spoke to him after the Arsenal game, 20 days ago. We were doing really well and he was really happy.

“Since then, I’ve had conversations with people close to him but not directly.

“Do you know what he thinks? If you don’t know, you can’t say this or that will happen. Nobody knows.

“We have been talking with the people here. I was talking with him. We were talking about football. In terms of football everything is fine.”

The reality is that everything is not fine, with the mutinous mood among the Chelsea fans intensifying over the past fortnight.

Losing skipper John Terry to inflammation in the battered right knee that has limited him to one Premier League start in three months - at Newcastle last week - was another blow.

Benitez is also unsure whether Demba Ba can be fully physically committed while wearing a face mask to protect the broken nose he suffered at St James' Park.

Over the past four years, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Andre Villas-Boas and Roberto De Matteo have all been sacked mid-season when Abramovich feared Chelsea were going to miss out on a top-four finish.

Should Spurs beat Newcastle in Saturday's lunchtime game, Chelsea will start against Wigan in fourth place.

Asked if he had received assurances that he was safe, Benitez could only respond: “I know that I have a game, an important game - and that is my priority.

“My contract is until the end of the season. I cannot talk about my future if my priority is the next game.

“I am sure I was training my players and preparing for this game. I cannot give you an answer.

“Why? Because I have to concentrate on the next game. I have a contract until the end of the season and we can be talking and talking, but all I can do is win games.

“My job is exactly the same. After winning, you can have better comments in the media in general, but that’s part of football.

“I’ve been in football for 26 years as a manager, and all my life as a player too. If you win, it’s fine. If not, people start talking. But I knew I was signing a contract for six or seven months."

Join Wigan - and become a man!

Stu Forster

Older and wiser: Di Santo is set to face former club Chelsea on Saturday

By David Anderson

Roberto Martinez claims Franco Di Santo knows he had to quit Chelsea to become “a man”.

Wigan striker Di Santo joined Chelsea with great expectations as a raw 18-year-old in 2008, but failed to start a senior game for the Blues.

Martinez snapped him up in August 2010 and has helped him mature into Lionel Messi’s team-mate with Argentina.

“I think he’s a man,” said the Latics boss, before Saturday's trip to Stamford Bridge. “When he arrived at Chelsea, he was a young boy with the world at his feet and he had to grow up quickly. And in football, you need to play games to do that.

“I think Franco knows he needed to get away from Chelsea to become his own man, to be able to experiment and develop as a footballer.

“I think Franco’s experience at Chelsea has made him the man he is now. It was an incredible opportunity to come to Europe through Chelsea, but now he’s a completely-different footballer after the experiences he had with Blackburn Rovers and ourselves.

“He’s two different players. The one he was at Chelsea, a young man full of dreams. Now he is a man living his dream.

“He’s come back from Sweden after sharing a dressing room with Messi, Higuain and Aguero. As a striker that’s as nice a dream as you can have in world football.”

Despite all the work Martinez has done on Di Santo, he is relaxed about the prospect of losing the South American on a free when his contract expires in the summer.

“That does not worry me,” he said. “I will never put a gun to a player’s head to get him to sign a contract.

“At the end of the season, whatever will happen, will happen and I’m not worried about it.”